Numerous investigators have conducted theoretical and experimental analysis of "short-term" memory in the mentally retarded. Studies of "long-term" retention have lagged drastically. While many workers hold to the hypothesis of a long-term memory deficiency, others have concluded the hypothesis is unfounded or disproved, but critical analysis has indicated that reliable findings are rare. Recent research by the present investigator has indicated that the nature of the retrieval conditions bears crucially on the availabilty of previously learned material. Under certain conditions, retrieval functions appear essentially equivalent over 10-, 20-, and 30-day intervals for both low and high IQ children. In another condition, an innovative attempt to fashion retrieval cues constituting a near reinstatement of the original verbal context of learning was made, and significant group separation was observed, favoring the high IQ subjects. The proposed research will consist of a comprehensive analysis of the prompt or eliciting conditions used in long-term memory tests, and be based on the partitioning of all context-related aspects of original learning. Study I consists of providing partial or no visual support to minimal amounts of original verbal context, where the no visual support condition is considered an analog of classroom conditions where material learned with visual or pictorial support is tested purely verbally; this study could document the difficulty of retrieving even "meaningful" material under impoverished retrieval cues. Study II expands on Study I, being an extensive but straightforward test of the effects of reasserting components of verbally specified contexts of original relations between disparate stimuli. Extensions of the interrogative technique to populations of more severely handicapped will also be conducted in an attempt to develop a more diagnostic utility for this procedure, which is sensitive to learning and memory phenomena. Analyses to elucidate and quantify the "quality" of the verbal elaborations will also be conducted, utilizing schemes from text and discourse analysis research.